Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats

poemanalysis.com/ode-to-a-nightingale-by-john-keats-poem-analysis/

Elise Dalli

A few of the most famous poems that John Keats has ever written are the six odes, which
includes Ode to a Nightingale. While it is unclear in what order they were written, Keat
wrote them in batches, and scholars argue that when one reads them in sequence, one
can see them form a thematic whole.

Ode to a Nightingale Summary

Ode to a Nightingale was written in 1819, and it is the longest one, with 8 stanzas of 10
lines each. It was written at Charles Brown’s house, after Keats was struck by the
melancholy singing of a nightingale bird, and it travels through the cabal of the Greek
gods, all the while emphasizing the feeling of melancholy – a tragic and often very Greek
emotion that Keats would have no doubt learned through his readings.

Ode to a Nightingale Analysis

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness,

That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

1/6
O for a draught of vintage! t

hat hath been

Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country-green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South!

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stainèd mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs;

Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

2/6
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

Fast-fading violets cover’d up in leaves;

And mid-May’s eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

3/6
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that ofttimes hath

Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

4/6
 To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

The poem itself is very unhappy; Keats is stunned at the happiness of the bird, and
despairs at the difference between it and its happiness and his own unhappy life. At the
start of the poem, the heavy sense of melancholy draws allusions to Ode to Melancholy,
and Keats – despite the death imagery – does not really want to die. The conflicted nature
of human life – mixture of pain/joy, emotion/numbess, the actual/the ideal, etc –
dominates the poem, so much so that, even at the end, it is unclear whether or not it
happened – ‘do I wake or dream?’

It can also be assumed that the heavy imagery of death and sickness could hark back to
his experiences taking care of his elder brother, who died of tuberculosis underneath
John Keats’ care. The unhappiness, however, that Keats feels in the poem is not
necessarily miserable – Keats writes that he has been ‘half in love with easeful Death’,
and describes the joy of listening to the nightingale’s song in a sort of euphoria. It can
therefore be considered that Keats would rather forget his unhappiness, than die: the
references to hemlock, and Lethe, solidify this argument, as both would blur the memory
enough to allow Keats to forget.

There are heavy allusions to mythology: Lethe, the river of forgetting that flows through
the underworld; Hippocrene, the fountain of the Muses made by Pegasus’ hooves which
brings inspiration; dryads, the spirit protectors of the forest; Bacchus, god of wine and
debauchery; Ruth and the corn-field is a reference to the book in the Bible; hemlock, the
poison that killed Socrates; Flora, the Roman goddess of nature.

Nature and imagination are shown to be a brief reprieve from human suffering, hence
the song of the nightingale, and its impressions. There is also a shi from reality to
idealism: Keats says that he would like to drink from ‘a draught of fine vintage’ (a very
fine wine) and transport himself to the ideal world that the nightingale belongs to. He
states that he will not be taken there by Bacchus and his pards (Bacchanalia, revelry and
chaos) but by poetry and art. Keats then goes on to describe his ideal world, making
5/6
reference to the ‘Queen Moon’ and all her ‘starry-eyed Fay’ – however, Keats cannot
actually transport himself into this world, and the end of the nightingale’s song brings
about the end of his fantasy. ‘Country green’, ‘Provencal song’ and ‘sunburned mirth’ all
point to a highly fantastical reality, especially considering the status of the world at the
time, and the mythological references help to maintain a surreal, dreamlike state
throughout the entire poem and to charge Keats’ fantasies with identifiable ideas and
figures.

Keats uses the senses heavily in all his poetry, relying on synaesthetic description to draw
the reader into the poem. It works especially well here because Keats’ fantasy world is
dark and sensuous, and he ‘cannot see what flowers are at my feet’; he is ‘in embalmed
darkness’. The darkness may have helped his imagination to flourish and furnish his
ideal creation, as well as lending a supernatural air to the poem.

The drowsiness comes from the longing to flee the world and join the nightingale – to
become like the nightingale, beautiful and immortal and organic – and after rejecting
joining the nightingale through Bacchanalian activity, he decides that he will attempt to
join the bird through poetry. Thus, the rapture of poetic inspiration matches the rapture
of the nightingale’s music and thereby links nature to poetry to art (nature as art and
beauty, a Romantic ideal). He calls the bird ‘immortal’, thereby also stating that nature
will survive man.

The bird’s song translates inspiration into something that the outside world can
understand; like art, the nightingale’s singing is changeable and renewable, and it is
music that is ‘organic’, not made with a machine. It is art, but art that cannot be viewed
and has no physical form. As night shifts into day – shifting from supernatural back into
fact – the bird goes from being a bird to a symbol of art, happiness, freedom and joy,
back to being a bird. It is contrasted, in the third stanza, by the reality of the world
around him – sickness, ill-health and conflict.

The first half of the poem represent the way man was – the pleasurable moments of life
that overwhelm and leave a gap behind when they’re over; the second half is maturity,
understanding truth, which leads to pleasure but also leads to pain.

At the end, Keats realizes that merging with the ‘embalmed darkness’ means dying,
giving himself up completely to death and becoming one of the world that he admires,
however it would mean that he can no longer hear the nightingale and would be farther
away from beauty. Neither life nor death is acceptable to Keats. He belongs nowhere.

Historical Background
In 1819, Keats left his paid position as a dresser at the hospital to devote himself to a
career in poetry, and it was during the spring that he wrote the five major odes, before
delving into a variety of other forms of poetry. More on John Keats can be found here.
6/6